Pinterest is telling marketers to think about Christmas and Q4 promotion campaigns a lot earlier than ever before. The earlier a brand starts planning a festive campaign, the higher its chances of success during the holiday shopping period, the social media platform insists.
According to Pinterest, people don’t just visit its website to scroll through images. Quite often, Pinterest users come to the platform for planning, looking for ideas, saving items and products, and filtering their choices to determine their purchase options weeks or even months ahead of time.
This unique consumer mindset is why Pinterest differs from most other social media sites. Unlike on many other platforms, the time when marketers start promoting their festive offers on Pinterest isn’t November or December. On Pinterest, advertisers should create a head-start and make sure they will be visible when the consumers are still forming their purchase choices.
Why Early Christmas Promotion Makes Sense on Pinterest
First, Pinterest claims that starting early increases a brand’s chances to be included into a user’s shopping shortlist before the most competitive period in holiday marketing.
Second, longer campaigns allow marketers to run more tests related to audience, creatives, and messages. Advertisers can learn and fine-tune their promotional offers so that during Q4, their focus will be on scaling successful campaigns rather than finding the right one.
This means that a Christmas promotion campaign shouldn’t be treated like a last-minute activity. Instead, Pinterest positions its holiday marketing as an extended planning cycle lasting many weeks, and sometimes months, before actual purchases.
Pinterest: Longer Campaigns Mean Better Performance
Pinterest provided a few pieces of statistics to prove its point. According to Pinterest, advertisers whose shopping campaigns run for more than six months report 33% higher ROAS than advertisers with campaigns that run fewer than three months.
Moreover, according to the company, longer learning phases positively affect campaign performance, especially if advertisers leverage Pinterest’s Conversion API data. Finally, Pinterest Performance+ campaigns (which involve using Pinterest API data) boast 20% lower CPA rate.
These numbers clearly speak for early campaign creation and implementation.
Pinterest Recommends an Always-On Approach
Finally, Pinterest suggests allocating up to 75% of Pinterest ad budget for always-on campaigns. The idea behind this approach is to maintain continuous visibility across all steps of the consumers’ planning journey.
The approach seems to work well for such categories as retailers and ecommerce stores, gifting businesses, home decor, fashion labels, and food brands. These categories perform well during the holidays because of a high level of Pinterest consumer interest in gifting, recipes, decorations, outfits, and special holidays.
What This Means for Social Media Marketers
In other words, holiday marketing success shouldn’t depend on last-minute activities alone. Pinterest claims that for marketers, it’s beneficial to start creating a promotion campaign months before the holiday season.
As Pinterest has almost 631 million monthly active users, the company remains a strong discovery source of consumers, helping brands promote their products before users decide to buy them.
Key Takeaway
Pinterest asks marketers not to look at Christmas campaigns as limited to the final two months. Instead, Pinterest advises advertisers to plan campaigns early and invest in continuous visibility using longer campaigns to collect more data and increase performance.